Pixar’s OUT: Experimental Look Development in the SparkShorts program

ABSTRACT

Pixar’s OUT, released summer 2020 on Disney+, is a short film with a highly stylized look, produced under the in-house SparkShorts program. The program champions new creative voices and storytelling via tight-knit production teams that work with limited budgets to push the boundaries of animation production at Pixar. In this talk we present the conception, design and implementation of the film’s unique visual style. Armed with some early inspirational artwork and some pre-production technical exploration, much of the look for the short was found during the course of production. Ultimately we landed on a style that was somewhere on the bridge between 2D and 3D animation. When we had it right, shots felt like a ”living painting” with characters and sets that felt like a medium come alive, instead of a series of paintings per-frame. Our goal was not to emulate a particular traditional medium but to evoke a feeling of something crafted that stood on its own as a novel style, which we achieved with a small but enthusiastic crew.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Image and video acquisition

        • 3D imaging

  • Computer graphics

    • Animation